If you hadn’t heard of Jonathan Leake then you are lucky. Jonathan is the Science Editor for the Sunday Times.
I’ve been wanting to write something on him for sometime, but all that has happened is that more evidence of his poor journalism keeps coming in that it has been difficult to keep up and impossible to put together the full story. So I’ve decided just to do a quick post.
Tim Lambert of the deltoid blog has done most of the work in digging beneath Jonathan Leake’s lazy journalism, quote mining for dramatic headlines, misrepresentation, plagiarism and journalistic fraud. Eli Rabbet has nicely listed all of Tim’s blog posts so that you can see all of pieces by Tim to that date on Jonathan Leake’s complete lack of journalistic standards.
The journalistic fraud is pretty egregious, Leake was informed two days before publication that his information was factually incorrect but Leake published the piece anyway. Stating that the evidence for 40% of the Amazon being susceptible to a reduction in rainfall was “bogus”. This is typical for Leake and especially so with anything related to climate change from attacking Google for the supposed emissions of a search to his repeated misrepresentation of climate scientists.
Leake is determined to make the case that the science of climate change is awash with uncertainty but can only seem to do it by misrepresenting those whom he quotes or actively ignoring the evidence before his eyes.